The present invention relates to user profiling.
In the early days of video broadcasting there existed only a limited number of available broadcast channels. In addition, there existed a limited number of video choices, such as movies, news, and sitcoms. To view a particular broadcast, the user needed to make sure he was available during the time that the desired content was broadcast. With a relatively limited amount of content available and a relatively limited number of broadcast channels this requirement for concurrent viewing of the content with the broadcast was not excessively burdensome. In addition, the amount of potential content was limited.
With the extensive development of additional sources of broadcast content together with the decreased ability of users to view the broadcast content concurrent with its broadcast, the concurrent viewing of all potentially desirable content has become a burdensome task. The development of a video cassette recorder (VCR) provides a partial solution to the need for concurrent viewing of content with its broadcast. The VCR permits viewers to record one or more selected programs or portions thereof, onto a tape. Selecting the times for recording may be performed manually at a time concurrent with the start of the content broadcast or otherwise programmed into the VCR to record particular broadcast content at a later time. The tape may then be subsequently played to permit the user to watch previously recorded content. The VCR also permits the user to perform several other functions, such as for example, play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, slow play, slow rewind, fast-reverse, and step frame-by-frame forward or reverse.
Subsequent to the development of the VCR, multimedia (e.g., video and audio) computer based broadcast content recording systems have been developed. These multimedia systems include recording media to record content thereon. One of the advantages of the multimedia systems is the ability to access and view selections from a collection of recorded programs in a nearly instantaneous manner without the need to rewind or fast-forward a tape.
While the development of such multimedia systems are beneficial, there is nearly an endless amount of potential content that is available to the user. As the amount of information and content available for consumption increases at an ever increasing rate, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to locate and access the particular content that fits their interests and tastes, without of course spending nearly endless hours watching uninteresting content.
Searching systems have been developed, such as those available from TiVO, that require the user to select a set of attributes of the potentially available content that they may be interested in. For example, the user may select the following attributes: action movies, comedy movies, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, and Tanya Puttin. The searching system attempts to match the selected attributes to the attributes of the potentially available content, which may be available from any suitable source, such as a storage device, the Internet, live broadcasts, pay-per-views, video-on demand, video libraries, etc. The search-based paradigm is often inconvenient and time consuming for the user to use. More importantly, with such a search tool the user is limited to content that he is already aware of Accordingly, it is difficult for the user to discover new content that he was previously unaware of that he may find interesting.
One technique to assist the user in discovering and selecting potentially desirable content is to construct and maintain a user profile, which provides a relatively compact description of a user's tastes and personal interests. The user profile may be subsequently utilized by the user to filter available content, so that items that are likely to be enjoyable are readily available to the user. The user profile may be specified directly by the user who explicitly states the descriptions of the programs he is interested in. Alternatively, the user profile may be automatically generated and updated to match the content consumption behavior of the users by recording and subsequently analyzing usage history information. The later alternative typically requires little or no effort on the user's part and is adaptable to the user's changing needs and interests. In addition, the user's perception of his preferences may be significantly different from what the user's content consumption habits actually suggest.
Several techniques have been proposed for discovering and updating user profiles based on the user's consumption history. These methods are often supervised, i.e., they rely on explicit user input (in the form of user-assigned rankings) to identify what the user likes or finds interesting, and the methods then construct simple user profiles that comprise terms extracted from descriptions of the content and their respective weights. The resulting profiles are typically arranged in a non-structured list of the user's preferences.